I'm an expert in business growth and overcoming organizational obstacles to success and a public speaker at conferences and management meetings on how to grow your organization. I'm a workshop leader for companies wanting to find their next growth engine, an author of "Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition" (Financial Times Press), a contributing editor for "International Journal of Innovation Science" and a leadership columnist for CIOMagazine and ComputerWorld. I am a former head of business development for Pepsico and Dupont, consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and am currently Managing Partner for Spark Partners. Harvard MBA. Hail from Chicago.

Why was this a big deal? Because, in these few words, Ms. Mayer pointed out that Research In Motion is no longer relevant. The company may have created the smartphone market, but now its products are so irrelevant that it isn’t even considered a market participant.

Ouch. But, more importantly, this drove home that no matter how good RIM thinks Blackberry 10 may be, nobody cares. And when nobody cares, nobody buys. And if you weren’t convinced RIM was headed for lousy returns and bankruptcy before, you certainly should be now.

But wait, this is certainly a good bit of the pot being derogatory toward the kettle. Because, other than the highly personalized news about Yahoo’s new CEO, very few people care about Yahoo these days as well. After being thoroughly trounced in ad placement and search by Google, it is wholly unclear how Yahoo will create its own relevancy. Someday soon it is likely a major advertiser may say “When placing our major internet ad program we are focused on the split between Google and Facebook,” demonstrating that nobody really cares about Yahoo anymore, either.

And how long will Yahoo survive?

The slip into irrelevancy is the inflection point into failure. Very few companies ever return. Once you are no longer relevant, customers quickly stop paying attention to practically anything you do. Even if you were once great, it doesn’t take long before the slide into no-growth, cost cutting and lousy financial performance happens.

Consider:

Garmin once led the market for navigation devices. Now practically everyone uses their mobile phone for navigation. The big story is Apple’s blunder with maps, while Google dominates the marketplace. You probably even forgot Garmin exists.

Sears was once America’s premier, #1 retailer. The place where everyone shopped for brands like Craftsman, DieHard and Kenmore. But when did you last go into a Sears? Or even consider going into one? Do you even know where one is located?

Kodak invented amateur photography. But when that market went digital nobody cared about film any more. Now Kodak is in bankruptcy. Do you care?

Motorola Mobility Razr phones dominated the last wave of traditional cell phones. As sales plummeted they flirted with bankruptcy, until Motorola split into 2 pieces and the money losing phone business became Google – and nobody even noticed.

When was the last time you thought about “building your body 12 ways” with Wonder bread? Right. Nobody else did either. Now Hostess is liquidating.

Being relevant is incredibly important, because markets shift quickly today. As they shift, either you are part of the trend going forward – or you are part of the “who cares” past. If you are the former, you are focused on new products that customers want to evaluate. If you are the latter, you can disappear a whole lot faster than anyone expected as customers simply ignore you.

So now take a look at a few other easy-to-spot companies losing relevancy:

HP headlines are dominated by write offs of its investments in services and software, causing people to doubt the viability of its CEO, Meg Whitman. Who wants to buy products from a company that would spend billions on Palm, business services and Autonomy ERP software only to decide they overspent and can never make any money on those investments? Once a great market leader, HP is rapidly becoming a company nobody cares about; except for what appears to be a bloody train wreck in the making. In tech – lose customers and you have a short half-life.

Similarly Dell. A leader in supply chain management, what Dell product now excites you? As you think about the money you will spend this holiday, or in 2013, on tech products you’re thinking about mobile devices — and where is Dell?

Best Buy was the big winner when Circuit City went bankrupt. But Best Buy didn’t change, and now margins have cratered as people showroom Amazon while in their store to negotiate prices. How long can Best Buy survive when all TVs are the same, and price is all that matters? And you download all your music and movies?

Wal-Mart has built a huge on-line business. Did you know that? Do you care? Regardless of Wal-mart’s on-line efforts, the company is known for cheap looking stores with cheap merchandise and customers that can’t maintain credit cards. When you look at trends in retailing, is Wal-Mart ever the leader – in anything – anymore? If not, Wal-mart becomes a “default” store location when all you care about is price, and you can’t wait for an on-line delivery. Unless you decide to go to the even cheaper Dollar General or Aldi.

And, the best for last, isMicrosoft.

Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft phone sales quadrupled! Only, at 4 million units last quarter that is about 10% of Apple or Android. Truth is, despite 3 years of development, a huge amount of pre-release PR and ad spending, nobody much cares about Win8, Surface or new Microsoft-based mobile phones. People want an iPhone or Samsung product.

After its “lost decade” when Microsoft simply missed every major technology shift, people now don’t really care about Microsoft. Yes, it has a few stores – but they are dwarfed in number and customers by the Apple stores. Yes, the shifting tiles and touch screen PCs are new – but nobody real talks about them; other than to say they take a lot of new training. When it comes to “game changers” that are pushing trends, nobody is putting Microsoft in that category.

So the bad news about a $6 billion write-down of aQuantive adds to the sense of “the gang that can’t shoot straight” after the string of failures like Zune, Vista and early Microsoft phones and tablets. Not to mention the lack of interest in Skype, while Internet Explorer falls to #2 in browser market share behind Chrome.

As investors we often hear about companies that were once great brands, but selling at low multiples, and therefore “value plays.” But the truth is these are death traps that wipe out returns. Why? These companies have lost relevancy, and that puts them one short step from failure.

As company managers, where are you investing? Are you struggling to be relevant as other competitors – maybe “fringe” companies that use “voodoo solutions” you don’t consider “enterprise ready” or understand – are obtaining a lot more interest and media excitement? You can work all you want to defend & extend your past glory, but as markets shift it is amazingly easy to lose relevancy. And it’s a very, very tough job to play catch- up.

Just look at the money being spent trying at RIM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Yahoo…………

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Hard to believe a company as irrelevant as RIM can be talked about so much. Selling 40 million smartphones in a year sounds pretty good to me. They may not be number 1 or number 2 but they are doing well, considering their current line of smartphones are past their prime and the new phones will be out in two or threee months.

Thanks for commenting John Method. How many new phones do you think RIM will sell of BB10? I predict it will have all the reception of the RIM Playbook. Mediocre reviews, and largely be about as interesting to customers as Droid phones were when launched.

RIM has over 80 MILLION subscribers. Many of them could choose any available smartphone and they chose BlackBerry. A significant number of them are waiting to upgrade to BB10. Even if it the OS is ONLY comparable to iOS or Android it will do well. Fact is the OS being showed to developers is very powerful, EASY to develop for and has at least a dozen programming options for developers to choose from. Stories abound of developers porting powerful apps from other platforms to BB10 in HOURS. Devs go where the money is.

RIM also has existing relationships with over 500 carriers around the world and BB10 launches globally on 30 Jan.

Thanks for your comment Nelson Batista. Maybe you are right and an outpouring of new apps will revive the moribund Blackberry platform. But, I don’t think so.

Of those 80million subscribers (is it really that high?) how many are carrying a corporate Blackberry they have been told they must carry, while also carrying a personal smartphone? My point is that it is still common to have a forced company Blackberry – and that market is rapidly going away as corporations convert to allowing BYOD (bring your own device). And as companies adopt iOS and Android platforms onto the servers, no longer requiring employees use the Blackberry — because the company wants employees accessible 24×7 and they tend to turn off (and leave at work) company Blackberries.

I never hear anybody say they are eager to receive the new Blackberry. Market leadership has shifted, and RIM has fallen further and further behind – no longer a significant portion of smartphone sales. And that was the comment from Ms. Mayer – that she wants her employees on state-of-the-art gadgets, which to her notion does not include Blackberry. Whether BB10 is fantastic or not, it simply isn’t relevant when almost all customers are looking at competitors for solutions.

Yes really 80 Million subscribers. Up 2 million in the last quarter and this on the now YEARS old and aging BB7 platform. Yes many in North America carry 2 smartphones. I agree that currently not many in North America are eager for the OLD BB but I think when BB10 launches perceptions will change and people will want the NEW BB. The mobile market continues to grow at an enormous pace. As you indicate customers are looking at solutions for mobile communication/computing and BB10 will deliver this if the glimpses of the OS being offered are any indication. The developer (not yet final) handset hardware appears on par with other flagship devices for the other OSes. I agree that this does not guarantee success to RIM but they will launch a very viable and powerful platform. The BB10 OS is NOT an update to BB7; it is a completely new OS designed for mobile computing and communication.

Apple wants to keep you locked into their ecosystem and buying their outrageously expensive (but slick) hardware. Android/Google wants to make sure you search with Google and view their ads to drive their real business. MicroSoft doesn’t want to lose the enormous desktop market as it all switches to handheld (and smaller) devices.

RIM wants to make sure you can communicate/compute where ever you may be. Consumers will decide; but I know which device I want.

Adam, I see more and more people like you who were predicting that change their minds when they actually get to use them for a while. Why do you think so many carriers, reviewers and analysts are changing their tune? It is because the new phones are that much newer and slicker than Android. They will be even slicker than Apple when they come out but the people looking at them are only seeing the older dev alpha prototypes with older hardware and intentionally limited software. I think if half of the analysts are changing their mind due to what they are seeing, that would imply that half of the population in general will also be pleasantly surprised, wouldn’t it? After all, these reviewers and analysts are people and consumers too.

Hello Fun article… I’d say relevance is relative. Example, lets say Kodak was a little more nimble and jumped to produce a viable digital camera option, okay what does it do now that my Razor takes great general purpose pictures that can be emailed or posted within seconds? Technology pardon the cliché is moving at light speed. Being first is not always the best option and being 3 rd or 4th is even worse. So if all these companies are irrelevant what’s the next big technology for the general consumer? Everyone has a smart phone, game console, pad, flat screen, computer….what’s next? What’s the next big semiconductor driver?

I get your point but agree that Microsoft is not dead, maybe not as flashy but definitely not dead. Practically every business computer in the world uses something Microsoft….IBM another technology innovator that went non flash but still making healthy earnings.

Either way In light of the “Who Moved My Cheese” paradigm you write a compelling article.